Paradise Crime Mysteries

by Toby Neal

  Just then Tom ran up, sweaty in his running clothes.

  “Oh my God, let me help!” he exclaimed.

  “Be careful,” Lei cautioned, and Tom scooped Keiki into his arms. He carried her up the cement steps onto the porch, peering awkwardly over the big collar. Lei fumbled the key into the lock and they went inside.

  “Holy crap, she’s big.” Tom panted as Lei punched in the deactivation code.

  He carried Keiki into the living room and then knelt, lowering the Rottweiler onto the bed Lei had prepared for her, the futon covered with Keiki’s favorite ratty old blanket. Lei settled the dog, patting and stroking her. Keiki tried to rise again and Lei pushed her back.

  “Just rest, baby. Everything’s going to be okay,” she soothed.

  “I’m sorry about the other day,” Tom said in a low voice. “I was an ass.”

  He was still kneeling beside Lei as he patted Keiki’s shining back. Lei had to grope to remember what he could be talking about. Ah, the confrontation in his kitchen.

  “It’s okay.” She stood up. “Thanks for the help.”

  “What happened?” He stood up as well, dark eyes concerned.

  “She got shot.”

  “Oh my God. Wow. Shit just keeps happening to you, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Well, let me know if I can help with anything.”

  “You sure showed up at a good time. Thanks for that.” She followed him and closed the door behind him as he left. The unsettled feeling she’d had about him was gone—he was just an awkward guy.

  Lei went into the kitchen, sighed as she looked at the blood orchid’s fallen petals on the kitchen table. She picked up the neglected plant and the spotted one Tom had given her.

  “Maybe now that the child molesters, stalkers, and rapists are out of the way I can go shopping,” Lei said over her shoulder. “Order pizza on me, okay Keiki?”

  She went out into the backyard. The last of day was dying out of the sky in a conflagration to the west as she walked across the fallen white pinwheels of plumeria to her orchid bench. She misted the plants and picked a branch of the fragrant plumeria flowers, careful to avoid the sticky white sap, put the flowers in a vase and called for pizza. She and Keiki deserved a treat.

  The doorbell rang as Lei sat beside Keiki with the TV on. She got up and put her eye to the peephole. Stevens stood there, holding an orchid plant. Her heart picked up speed.

  “Hi.”

  “Hey Lei. Heard a friend just got out of the hospital.”

  Lei laughed nervously and reached for the plant, but Stevens put the orchid behind his back. He went around her and into the house, kneeling by Keiki on her pallet. The big dog lifted her head. He put the plant down beside her.

  “Brought you something,” he said. The vivid spray of dendrobium looked like a flock of tiny yellow butterflies arcing over the dog. Keiki looked at him soulfully, then closed her eyes in bliss as he sat beside her, rubbing between her ears.

  Lei ducked her head as she went into the kitchen. He’d told her he wasn’t accepting their breakup, and it was hard to hold out against an underhanded tactic like bringing her dog an orchid. She had to smile as she opened Stevens a beer, brought it to him as he sat beside Keiki on the floor.

  “She sure is happy to see you.” The dog had fallen asleep with her head on his leg.

  The doorbell rang again. Lei paid the pizza guy and brought the box over to the coffee table beside Stevens.

  “Want some?” She opened the box.

  “My timing is impeccable,” he said. “We bachelors have a way of dropping by about six p.m. and getting invited to dinner. Pono’s family gave me laulau last night.”

  “Hmm, never thought of that. Bachelor timing—I should try it sometime.” Lei bit into a gooey slice, handing Stevens one on a paper towel.

  A silence descended. A frisson of awareness of his nearness lifted the hair on the back of her neck, translated into an exquisite hyperfocus on the details of the room, the textures in her mouth, the muted movement of the TV screen. Lei wished she could get up and make herself an emergency vodka shot, maybe two.

  They finished the pizza. Lei drank a glass of water instead and kept her eyes anywhere but on Stevens.

  “So,” he said.

  “So.”

  “Did you hear the latest on Ray?”

  “No. What’s the story?”

  “He’s going to lockup soon as he leaves the hospital. Don’t think he can make bail and the Changs don’t appear to be picking up the tab.” Stevens leaned back against the couch, sipped his beer. “Healani Chang is sending us a message by leaving him in there.”

  “I wish I hadn’t liked him. I guess I feel bad he’s paralyzed.”

  “You kidding me? The guy kept asking you out. What do you think he meant to do to you once he had you alone?”

  Lei thought back to the gun range, the strange expression in those changeable hazel eyes behind the plastic safety goggles as he asked her out for the last time. Good thing she’d been so determined to use up her ammo.

  “Shit.”

  “No shit,” Stevens answered. He took a sip of his beer. “Just like Ito. You did what had to be done.”

  “Not really. I could have let him get away. He almost did.”

  “After trying to kill you? After shooting Keiki?” Incredulity in his tone. They both looked at the big Rottweiler, snoring softly in her funnel collar, her head pillowed on Stevens’ thigh.

  “You’re right. Letting him get away wasn’t an option.” She felt something dark unknotting inside of her. She hadn’t even realized she felt guilty.

  Stevens put his hand over her good one where it rested on the trunk table.

  “I don’t know what I would have done if something had happened to you.”

  Lei looked down at the big hand covering hers.

  He lifted it an inch, hovering above her hand. She could still feel faint heat, a magnetic tingling. She turned her palm up, reached up with her fingertip to the palm of his hand, drew it lightly down to his fingertip, and swiveled their hands so they were facing each other, palms touching upright.

  She saw the hairs rise on his forearm, and he made a tiny sound.

  She couldn’t look at him because she knew what she’d see—a longing that matched her own. Their fingers played together, dancing, saying all that couldn’t be said, and finally her hand curled up, resting cupped in his. He held it gently, lowered it to the tabletop. Warmth enfolded her through his fingers.

  “Remember when I said we should wait to be together?” Stevens asked.

  She nodded. Remembered that long-ago evening when he’d tried to set some rules.

  “I told you I was messed up. I still am,” Lei said.

  “I told you something then. It’s still true.”

  “What?”

  “That if you could work on trusting me, I could work on waiting. I’ll wait as long as it takes.”

  “Okay.” She looked down at her curled hand resting in the cup of his. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you. They don’t call me Hurricane Lei for nothing.”

  Turn the page to keep reading book two of the Paradise Crime Mysteries, Torch Ginger!

  Torch Ginger

  Lei Crime Book 2

  Rom. 7:20

  So I find this law at work: when I want to do good, evil is right there with me.

  Chapter One

  Wednesday, October 20

  People said Kaua`i was the last of the Wild West, a jungle paradise of secretive people and strange spiritual forces. After two months, Detective Leilani Texeira just found Kaua`i slow and boring. She leaned on her hand and fiddled with the Bic ballpoints in a mug on her desk, looking for one that still worked as she contemplated a slim pile of case jackets in front of her.

  Lei shuffled the pile, closed her eyes, and pulled one out. The vacation-rental burglary case had now become the project of the day. She sighed and opened the file, scanning the incident reports f
iled by Paradise Realty, the company managing the rentals.

  “Excuse me.” Lei looked up into blinking brown eyes in a chubby-cheeked face. Long brunette hair curled over shoulders bisected by a bulky leather purse, a plastic shopping bag held in one hand. “The guy at the front sent me to you, and I’d like to—I’d like to report a missing person.”

  The girl’s round eyes blinked harder and tears seemed imminent. Lei felt familiar anxiety, a prickle along her arms that tightened her chest. She pushed the mug of pens away and pointed to the orange plastic chair alongside her desk.

  “Have a seat. I’m Detective Texeira.”

  “Um. Hi. Kelly Waterson.” Kelly clutched the bulging handbag on her lap like it held the crown jewels, setting the shopping bag at her feet.

  Lei shook one of the Bics and jotted the name on a yellow legal pad.

  “Name of the missing person?” Lei kept her voice brisk as blinking turned to sniffling. She pushed a box of tissues over without making eye contact.

  “Jay. Jay Bennett.” Kelly blew her nose and firmed her voice. “I mean, something’s very wrong. He’s not where he said he was.”

  Lei turned to her computer and her fingers rattled over the keys as she typed “Jay Bennett” into the local database. Nothing came up. No Hawaii driver’s license, no outstanding warrants. She typed in Kelly’s name—same result.

  “Your relationship to the missing person?”

  “Girlfriend.”

  “How long has he been gone?”

  “He was supposed to call me yesterday. He’s not picking up. So it’s been at least twenty-four hours. I decided to fly out and surprise him. He’s been camping in Hanalei.” A catch in the breathy voice.

  “So he has a cell phone?”

  “He has a cell, but he keeps it off. He’s on…a walkabout is what he’s calling it. He’s staying away from technology.” Kelly told Lei the number, and her voice rang with pride as she said, “He hitchhiked all over the States for six months, then came to Hawaii. He’s been exploring the island.”

  “Where are you two from?”

  “Clovis, California. Not much to it, just a flat stretch of Central California nowhere. Jay wanted to see more, do more, before he started working in his dad’s auto dealership.”

  “Any particular reason you think he’s not just on a long hike or something?” Lei pulled up the Missing Persons Report screen on her computer and began filling it in. She pushed her thick curly brown hair back impatiently, bundling it into a wad and spearing it with the Bic, returning her attention to the screen.

  “He thought someone was, you know, stalking him. He said he had a funny feeling about it. I decided to surprise him. I flew in from California today and drove out to where he was camping, at a park called Pine Trees. He wasn’t there.” She dug in the tote and brought out a man’s leather wallet, plunked it on the desk. “I looked in the trash and his stuff was there. I put his clothes in this bag here—but he’d never throw his wallet away.”

  Uh-oh.

  Lei snapped on a pair of latex gloves from a box beside the Kleenex and opened the wallet.

  A driver’s license: Jay Bennett, Clovis, California, age twenty-seven. A Visa credit card poked its silver edge up out of a slot, along with a Paradise Realty card with a phone number on the back. Fattening the cash area of the wallet were folded paper shapes.

  Lei upended the wallet, and a crane, a turtle, a fish, a diamond, and a jumble of other origami in cursive-covered lavender paper fell out onto the desk.

  “Something’s happened to him! Those are my letters to him all these months. He would never throw that wallet away.” Kelly stuffed a double-fisted handful of Kleenex against her mouth, shaking. Jack Jenkins, Lei’s partner, blew into their cubicle with his typical energy and flung a jacket over the back of his chair. He paused, assessing the situation with the wariness of a man unexpectedly confronted by female emotion.

  “Hi, Lei—I’m getting coffee.”

  Lei nodded and he disappeared. Lei took the real estate card out of the pile and clipped it onto the case jacket for the burglaries—there might be a connection to pursue.

  Kelly seemed to pull herself together and reached into the capacious purse to pull out a man’s rubber sandal, then set it on the desk.

  “This is Jay’s shoe. It was under the picnic table. These were on it, like this.” She took three stones out of her pocket and set them on the sandal in a triangle.

  Lei looked at the shoe and stones, frowned. It was creepy. They looked like they meant something, and together with the wallet, this case had just gone from odd to suspicious. She dug in the drawer of the desk for her little point-and-shoot and took a picture of the sandal with the stones on it. One was reddish, one green, and one a gray matrix with flecks of blue fire. She spread the origami shapes out and photographed them and each of the items in the wallet.

  “Pine Trees is not an official campground.” Lei’s camera clicked. She ran past the scenic park shaded by huge ironwood trees in Hanalei nearly every morning and made it a point to call in any illegal campers. In fact, she had called in a guy sleeping under a picnic table just yesterday. “Which part of the park was he in?”

  “I know it’s not a real camping area. He…likes to do things his own way. He was just crashing in his sleeping bag wherever. He said he liked the picnic table near the bathrooms.”

  “Hm. Okay.” Lei stowed the items in two evidence bags and turned back to her screen. She got a physical description: six foot two, curly blond hair, blue eyes, bearded, age twenty-seven. By the time she’d filled in the missing persons report, she was sure this was the guy she’d seen just yesterday.

  Kelly produced a photo from her wallet, and Lei took it to the back room and made an enlarged color photocopy of the young man’s square-cut, smiling face.

  “Kelly.” Returning, Lei roused the girl from a reverie as Kelly stared blankly at the fabric-covered divider, fingers wound tightly into the strap of the purse. “I wish you’d left this in the trash and called for a unit from out there. We may have blurred any prints that were on the wallet. Finding this is definitely concerning.”

  “Some of his stuff is still in the trash.” Kelly’s voice was muffled by the pile of Kleenex she pressed to her face.

  Jenkins slid into his seat in their cubicle. He set a mug of inky fluid beside Lei. “Sorry I’m late. Peace offering. How can I help?”

  “Ugh, if that’s break room coffee, I’ve already had my caffeine ration for the day. This is Kelly. Her boyfriend is missing.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Kelly.” Jenkins’s fashionably spiked blond hair seemed to quiver with sympathy and his blue eyes were kind. Lei had no problem admitting he was better with people than she was.

  The girl gave a snuffle and extended her hand to shake his. “When can you start looking for Jay?”

  “Hopefully today,” Lei said. “Did he ever say anything about suicide?”

  Kelly’s eyes went wide. “No. Of course not.”

  “I have to ask. I mean, he’s alone, traveling. He may have been depressed, worse off than you knew. He could have thrown his stuff away and left the stones on his shoe as some kind of message.”

  Lei felt a squeeze in her chest as the girl considered the idea, taking it like an arrow to the heart. Kelly’s eyes, which at first seemed brown, had gone foresty green—tears welling from somewhere transformatively deep. Then she shook her head, so hard her curls bounced.

  “No. Jay wasn’t depressed. He would never do that. He said he was being stalked—maybe the shoe with the stones was a message from whoever took him.”

  Lei knew when to back off.

  “Well, then, I just need an idea of any people he might have hung with and known.” She picked up another Bic, scribbled on the pad to get the ink going.

  “He mostly hung out with other people who were living in the parks. There’s kind of a group of them. They move around to stay ahead of their permits, which expire every ten days. He got
a little sick of them. That’s part of why he was crashing in Pine Trees. But he never told me any names.”

  “Thanks, Kelly. Give me some contact information so we can keep in touch, okay?”

  “Sure. I was supposed to go back in a few days, but I can’t until I know what happened to Jay… This was just supposed to be a surprise, to see if he was ready to come home.”

  Lei blinked at the volume of water the girl generated as Kelly’s eyes filled again. She got her number and hotel address, turned to Jenkins. “Can you sign these items into evidence? I’ll walk Kelly out.”

  “Hang in there, Kelly.” Jenkins patted the girl’s shoulder and took the two bags she’d packed Jay’s items into. Lei led Kelly through the beehive of modular units to the pneumatic front doors.

  “Please find him,” the girl said, green-brown eyes swimming again. She turned away and beeped open the doors of an electric-blue Ford Fiesta rental.

  “I’ll do my best.” Lei reached into her pocket to rub the black worry stone she always carried as she watched Kelly drive away. She got back to their cubicle just as Jenkins returned from signing the items into evidence. He grinned at her, blue eyes alight.

  “Well, this looks interesting.” He rubbed his hands together. “So tired of getting all the cases nobody wants.”

  Lei flung herself into her office chair, did a couple spins to discharge energy. “Poor kid. God.” She knocked back half of the mug of coffee and made a gagging noise. “I forget how bad this stuff is. Yeah, this case ought to be interesting, and now we get to take a drive out to the North Shore. We can also follow up on these two, J-Boy.” She held up the files on the vacation rental burglaries and a noise complaint against a group located on a papaya farm in the same area.

  “J-Boy? That my new handle?” Nicknames were a popular Kaua`i Police Department thing. “Fine, then. I’ll call you Hurricane Lei.”

  “That wasn’t even funny when it first came out on the Big Island.”

  Lei scooped up the backpack she carried in lieu of a purse. That morning she’d taken a moment to whisk mascara onto tilted dark eyes, run a wand of gloss over her wide mouth. She wished she didn’t have the sprinkle of cinnamon freckles across her nose—Portuguese, Hawaiian, and Japanese heritage made for a blend that was more interesting than pretty.